When she was a teenager (she’s 27 now, and a student nurse), Amara was raped. It affected her in ways she didn’t expect, and couldn’t find help for. “I couldn’t go to the doctor anymore because I didn’t want to be touched,” she says. “I tried to go for a cervical smear and it reminded me so much of the forensic testing I’d had - ‘lie down, do this, do that’ - that I couldn’t go through with it.”


At first, Amara says, “I thought maybe I was really weird and there was something wrong with me”. She googled “rape, body image, can’t go to doctor” and found nothing.
But when she asked the other women in the support groups she attended about it she quickly realised, “Ok, I’m definitely not the only person.” Those women talked to other women and soon Amara was receiving emails from all over the country.
“It felt like I’d opened the floodgates in terms of women talking about how sexual assault had left them feeling,” she says.
“Some women had eating disorders after experiencing sexual violence because they felt like they just wanted to disappear. Some were self-harming. One woman in her sixties said it had affected her entire marriage. She was raped 40 years ago, before she met her husband, and it had ruined their whole sex life. She found it difficult to be touched. It affected the way she felt about herself physically.”
Amara understood the woman’s feelings. She was so desperate to escape her own body – she described her body to me as “the crime scene” – that she couldn’t even look at herself in the mirror. “I was connecting my physical self to what had happened,” she says. “And to all the feelings that went with it. I felt numb, like my body didn’t belong to me anymore.”
Sh! in Hoxton Square, London, is the UK's only sex shop specifically for women
Her solution was Café V – a monthly meeting in a Shoreditch sex shop. It offers practical advice on how to enjoy sex again after rape.
“It’s ‘v’ for ‘vagina’,” she says with a laugh. “We wanted it to be fun. Often I’d go to support groups and come out more depressed than I’d gone in. You don’t want a regular downer, you want a space where you can say, ‘this is how I’m feeling, this is the issue I’m having, how do I deal with it?’”
It’s held in Sh!, the UK’s only sex shop specifically for women. “They’ve been incredibly supportive,” says Amara. Around thirty women attend each session. Some of them are so tense during sex they black out or vomit. For others, any physical intimacy triggers flashbacks of the assault.
Amanda O’Donovan, the psychologist, tells me, “People with a history of sexual trauma often dissociate from their bodies completely, so it’s a matter of encouraging them to focus on physical sensations again.” She helps run Cafe V as well as the My Body Back clinic.
At a recent meeting, she suggested taking a moment in the shower each day to notice the feeling of warm water on the skin.
She also gives advice on when and how to tell new partners about the assault, and how to be clear about what they do and don’t feel comfortable with. Café V is now launching in cities around the UK and the My Body Back team is talking to organisations in the US about running workshops there, too.


The clinic has seen a similar response. The flagship operation in St Bart’s is already enormously over-subscribed. “Scaling up is a big priority,” says O’Donovan. They are working with NHS trusts in Nottingham, Birmingham, Glasgow and Cardiff to open further clinics over the next few months, and have been approached by organisations in New York and Los Angeles about replicating the model in the US.
The demand is huge. “One in five British women has been raped,” says Amara. “The average GP will have hundreds if not thousands of patients dealing with this on their books, even if they don’t realise it.”
I visit the My Body Back clinic on its second day of operation. It looks like your average NHS clinic: strip lighting, speckled grey floor, lilac-upholstered waiting room chairs. Except for the coffee table, which is laden with gourmet teas, cakes and pretty china cups.
“We get through a lot of tea here,” laughs Amara. The spread serves a serious purpose. Before they arrive, the patients tell Amara “what they’d like to drink, what newspapers they’d like to read - anything that will make them feel more comfortable. Today, someone asked for crosswords. Another woman wanted a fan and a sick bag. It’s about giving them choice.”
They also discuss potential triggers. For example, one patient wanted to make sure nobody told her to relax while she had her smear test – because it was the same word her rapist had used throughout the attack.
Messages from the Notes of Love project, in which strangers offer support to victims of sexual violence
As well as Café V and the My Body Back clinic, Amara runs a number of other workshops including Notes of Love, in which strangers write messages of support to victims of sexual assault, which Amara distributes to Rape Crisis centres.
The messages help with something Amara herself struggled with. “You see these polls saying people think it’s the woman’s own fault if she gets raped,” she says. “I worried about starting My Body Back because I didn’t want to get judged.”
In the end, she decided providing these services was more important. “And you know what? Nobody’s been anything but positive about it.”
We run through My Body Back’s upcoming events together. “Gosh, we’re doing a lot aren’t we?” she says, a little surprised at herself – and at the support she has received.
“It just goes to show,” she reflects. “Once people want to get things done, they do.”